A New Home

I’m just back from a trip to Sitka. Jan wasn’t feeling up to the travel and I didn’t want to be gone too long so I went back to my old stomping grounds for only two days to celebrate my old boss’s installation onto the Supreme Court of Alaska bench. There was a wonderful and heartfelt ceremony held at the Alaska Brotherhood Hall plus a reception and party at a club downtown. The Brotherhood hall is a very historic center of the Alaska Native Brotherhood, there were lots of speeches where many judges including the Supremes gave there kind observations of my friend Jude Pate’s ascension to the High Court. I read Ask Me, which is my favorite poem by William Stafford. After the reception there was lots of music. My old band the Big Fat Babies played one song we wrote for Jude and then Jude’s band, The Glorious Youth Parade, played a long and raucous set. We ate oysters on the half shell and fresh caught salmon. It was a fine time.

Our Old House… taken from the porch of my former office.

I slept three nights in my old office. The weather was calm but cloudy with just a bit of rain. I borrowed a car from a friend. I saw many of my old friends and took care of some chores I still needed to do in Sitka.

I was almost overcome with nostalgia by being back at my old home place. I visited with Nancy Ricketts who lives in the Pioneer’s Home, where she has a lovely room on the third floor. My friend Manoj organized a dog party which was a tradition of ours. Manoj even made his spicy Biscuits and Gravy which we ate around our gas heaters under the covered porch. There was a rowdy game of Dog Bocce which began with the usual half an hour discussion of the rules. The Dogs are aloud to play in Dog Bocce mostly because there is no stopping them once the first ball is thrown out on the lawn.

Jude and one of his former Court Clerk named Al.

Jude is living most of the time in Juneau now because the supreme court does not have quarters for him in Sitka. Most of the Big Fat Babies no longer live in Sitka. Some of my best friends have died and Nancy Ricketts is 98 years old.

Even though I felt a loving feeling for my old home, I realized that my current place in Carmel, California is my nes home now. Home is with Jan and Finn , Emily and Arthur. Almost every person in Sitka asked me how I liked California, and I said I still missed the wild country and our old waterfront house, but there was a lot of good to be said about California: Climate, Culture, Medical Services, Bobcats on the trail and little lizards running in the dust. I don’t like the traffic down here but every place that hasn’t been paved over in California is still brimming with beauty.

“The Old Straley Place.”

I had to hold back tears when I left the Pioneer’s Home in Sitka. Nancy Ricketts is the daughter of the famous Edward Ricketts of Monterey California. I helped her with the first volume of her memoir and she tells me that I’m going to have to put together the second volume when she is gone. Though she has some short term memory problems now her mind is still sharp when it comes down to the important things. Jan and I talk with her on the phone about three times a week. And she still reads the history of Monterey books we send her every month. She is aa good friend and a smart woman. We miss her terribly when we are apart.

Nancy Ricketts in her room at the Pioneer’s Home. The portrait on her left is an original charcoal drawing of her father, Edward F. Ricketts, who some say is the true father of “Deep Ecology” and was definitely a hero to John Steinbeck.

Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again, but you may not belong there anymore. By the time I rocketed down the short runway leaving Sitka at six in the morning I was beginning to think that maybe I didn’t belong in Sitka, Alaska anymore. While I love it still, it is not a good spot for an old man like me. Things change, like my own health, and the death of friends certainly, but also the birth of new people like Arthur. His appearance in the world changes things for Jan and me. But also the newness of the adventure of being in a new place changes the feeling of being in one place for a long time. Adventures make you feel brand new and can turn your eyes toward the future. I fully expected to die in Sitka, but now I’m not thinking about where I’m going to die…. I’m thinking of where I’m going to live, and what I will see in the time I have left: Bob cats on the berm, lizards in the dust, dogs rolling in the long dry grass, and a baby boy growing up, is more than enough right now, more than the constant and familiar. A new home is an adventure. A new home is a gift one doesn’t always get.

Here is an old poem I wrote long ago when It first occurred to me that I may not have one permanent home any more.

Small Town Tragedies

Work has slowed down. Waiting for comments on my manuscript. I’m trying to write a film script but the harder I work on it the harder it seems to get.

I’m headed to Sitka tomorrow for a celebration of a friends new job. Jan was going to come with me but she was feeling poorly and I started worrying that she would have a hard time with the travel. So I’m just going up for two full days, a party, a short visit to my old home town and then back to the Carmel Valley.

Word is the weather is good in Sitka. Blue sky and calm days out on the water. The town is sad because a local young man flipped his boat while working on a fishing charter and all hands were lost. One body was found and four were never found, including the young captain. Such a thing sends a chill down everyone in a small town. The weather had been bad the day of the loss: high winds and steep breaking waves. I don’t know the details of the investigation as to why or how the boat rolled over. It was found off the north edge of Sitka Sound near a place called low island.

Death is a part of life, and small towns absorb the brunt of the personal suffering which come with some regularity. Wild country has it’s dangers… but there are dangers everywhere. Its just in a small town you are likely to know the parties involved.

The first person I knew who died was a kid in my sixth grade class named Jeffery. His dad had taught him how to fist fight and most of my friends stayed away from him. His dad also bought him a little motorcycle called a “Tote Goat” and I was green with envy. It was the only time I ever wished I was someone else. I wanted to be feared… just a bit. I wished my father had taught me how to fight. But he hadn’t.

Jeffery was hit by a car while he was zipping around on his motorbike. We lived in a small town then and there was kind of phone tree of mothers passing on information about Jeffery’s condition. I will never forget the moment she old me that the doctors had drilled holes in his skull to relieve the pressure from the swelling of his brain. I was very conflicted and sad about his death. I didn’t go to his funeral because we hadn’t been friends… I didn’t really like him because I had watched him once beat up a smaller boy in the parking lot of the public swimming pool… but I certainly didn’t think he would die. The thought that death was always possible and could touch down like a tornado without warning, was a life changer for me.

My mom would evoke Jeffery’s name anytime there was any talk among my siblings about riding a motorcycle. My mother never forgot or forgave these kind of tragedies, and for a strange reason this small town view of tragedy became a part of my psyche. I say strange because although I life in a small community now I don’t feel tied in to the workings of fate the way I probably should now that I’m a Californian. This is my fault, probably because I came here looking for a bunker to protect me from ill health and bad luck. I’m less likely to slip and fall on the ice here, I’m less likely to attend friends funerals because I have fewer friends close by. Having fewer tragedies is a good thing, but I have to think that I’m poorer for it.

I’m looking forward to being in Sitka, and I’d like to stay longer but I don’t like leaving Jan alone. Finn and Emily will take care of her the four days I’m gone. But I don’t want to budget anymore time away.

I will take photos and give you a full report here when I get back.

Here is a poem I wrote a few years ago about the summer I worked on the South Creek Forest fire near Twisp when I turned 17.

A Rumination About The Brain (or perhaps a rumination about ruminating)

My morning routine includes waking up, making a cup of tea, and sitting on the couch in our little apartment and listening to my favorite news podcasts. Then i usually take Dot out for her morning constitutional to the dog park about a half a mile away where she rolls in the dirt and eventually poops in the corner. I clean up after her and then walk to the edge of the river where Dot likes to wallow. Then we sit on a bench by the river and I listen to the birds and ruminate on the news.

Then its back home to where I have some more tea and I begin to work on which ever project I’ve got going and get ready to take Jan to whatever appointment she has that day with whichever doctor or therapist she has scheduled. Today she had both her physical therapy, and her voice therapy. Later in the week she will have her neuro-feedback and then sometimes an actual doctors visit. It’s pretty simple and usually pleasant when the traffic isn’t crazy.

Today I asked her how her voice therapist visit went and she said. “She told me that Parkinson’s disease wants to make everything inside of your head small. So my job is to make them big.” When I asked for a bit more she said. “It makes my movements small and jerky and my voice small and mumbling. My job is to make everything big and loud.”

Jan has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s for about twenty years, though looking at pictures it seems pretty clear that her brain was slowing down on the production of Dopamine for longer than that: photos show flat affect, a slackness in her face and a rigidity in one of her arms and not swinging her arms when she walked. Anyway, she has had this condition a good long while.

My news podcasts are full of stories about Artificial Intelligence. There is a lot of lose talk about how we are close to creating a machine that will think in a way that is bigger and louder than a human brain. Lately I have been ruminating about the brain.

Of course the Spector out there is that we are about to build a machine that in a sense will be an all powerful psychopath without feelings or a moral center which will be able to hack into any man made system and wreak havoc. (as if human’s never had the ability to wreak havoc without the help of a psychotic robot before) The questions arises, are these worries really founded, and it seems that in the future it is possible, but still I’m wondering if we are not projecting our dark worries onto complex machines, that don’t really think, but merely calculate on a huge scale.

Two things bother me about this. One: the idea that we can build an all new powerful brain when we still don’t understand our own home grown brains sitting on top of our necks. (let alone fix the ones that are broken) And two: our naivety at thinking that we can really built a brain that allows the machine to be if not sentient then have a will to act.

It probably is a bad Idea to keep pursuing building these powerful calculating machines, no matter how we think of them, not because we would be building a monster, but because we have monster’s inside of ourselves that will find representations inside these machines. AI computers are already biased against women and people of color because the people who build them have those same qualities whether they admit them or not. There is also a class bias built into our fears of these machines. Robots have been replacing workers for dozens of years now. And the freak out rate has been much lower than now. Because now white collar jobs are at risk of being replaced. Because machines can do the parlor trick of seeming to be creative when really they are just massive calculators, fast learners of patterns and can skip two steps ahead of a human brain when trying to predict old patterns of expression.

Clearly, I’m out of my depth here. The real scholars in this field are not engineers, by philosophers and psychologists. The truth is that soon enough we will be able to wire up a machine nearly as complicated as the neural network of a human brain. But we are still a long way away from building a machine that can grow its own brain as we do. For I believe that to be truly sentient you need a body that grows from a seed into a flesh and blood structure that feels pain and forges breeding relationships. We are a long way from being able to do that.

Just as we are a long way from building a machine that can leave work and sit in the sun and say, “Man I’m exhausted. I hope my partner is in a good mood when I get home.” A machine may say those words unbidden from a huge script of possible things to say but they cant feel it and create the expression from experience. You need a body to be sentiant.

Watching my baby grandson grow only confirms this. He struggles with language and understanding. You can ask him a question and you can see him processing, processing. “Arthur will you bring me the white bowl,” and after hard work, he turns and brings it to me. I don’t know how much of the request he understands. Does he know, “White” or “Bowl” I don’t know but he clearly recognizes that he lives in a physical context: there is me, and him, and that thing he was playing with in the sandbox. He lives in a physical reality and he knows through growing his own brain… which is different than transferring a massive dump of data. Which computers will always be better at than we are.

The danger with machines is that human’s are lazy and we’ve always built things to carry our load: wheels, shovels, pulleys, bombs but the danger of building machines that manipulate language is that we are filled with prejudgements, and contradictions. Machines will be able to destroy us only if we build them to do just that, and it seems that we should be able to place checks into our inventions to prevent our own destruction… but it will take an extraordinary amount of self awareness. Which of course is the problem and takes the issue out of engineering and into the world of humanistic contemplation. Coming all the way back to the question as old as the pyramids: Just because we can build something, does that mean we should?

Here is a short poem I wrote for a dance troop in Sitka, They were experimenting with the techniques of the great dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham who would ask his dancers to improvise on a single scrap of writing. I wrote this for them and they made a beautiful dance.

Mother's Day

It’s been another busy week. I had jury duty in Salinas, and I forgot to bring a book, which was a mistake. I sat in a room and a hallway with perhaps two hundred other people and tried not to worry about how much and how often I had to pee. Maximum boredom. At lunch I made it to a fine little taco shop and had a good meal. Nothing to drink. Then back to the courthouse where I waited some more. From eight fifteen until two in the afternoon, I waited. No one around me seemed in the mood to chat, for fear of starting to complain, I suspect. The Court staff were all very professional and and their instructions were clear. Unfortunately the process was slow. At three o’clock I was called into a courtroom with sixty other people where I answered some questions for a very experienced and affable judge, I filled out a form and was dismissed because of my past work as a criminal defense investigator.

Boring as it was I had a pretty good time watching the people around me: hispanic citizens and Vietnamese, as well as working class white folks and the occasional expensively dressed rich person. We were all there united in our boredom, united in the irritation at being jerked out of their lives to have to sit in a government building with too few bathrooms and no coffee. Several people brought their young children, thinking perhaps that this was an easy way for a get out of jail free card. I heard a very patient court employee tell one such mother that she would need to make other arrangements for her child. That she could delay her service today to make those arrangements but simply having a child did not make you ineligible. “Look at all these people here,” she said patiently, “do you think none of them have kids, or other responsibilities they should be taking care of. Jury duty is one of the few requirements of our citizenship. It’s kind of like taxes. It just is something we have to do.” The mother did not seem won over by the clerks arguments re: civic duty, but she did accept the postponement of one day and promised to be back. She didn’t yell or pull a gun, she just promised to be back.

Frankly, I was amazed at how civil the mother and the court clerk were and this civility got me thinking.

Jan teaching Arthur the Electric Finger.

The day before jury service was Mother’s Day… which I had always thought of as a fake holiday, propagated by the greeting card industry and Big Chocolate. But not so much this year. Our daughter in law’s family asked us to go to mother’s day brunch. Brunch is (I had also thought )was also a kind of fake meal propagated by the makers of hard soft boiled eggs, Hollandaise sauce, and steam tables.

But here too, I was wrong. Mother’s day this year was a feast and a unbridled festival of love: Amazing food and sincere expressions of love. There was a new born, a toddler, mothers, grand mothers and a great grand mother around our table. The pallet of the day was pastels in blue, and pink, and gratitude was apparent all around. The food was tremendous and all the women seemed more formidable than I had remembered.

The Basham, Lyons and Straley family.

We all have a million reasons not to feel connected to our fellow citizens. Politics suck, and culture is just set up for arguments. There are so many things that separate us from the criminal defendants and the squabbling people in civil litigation. But one thing is certain, every one of us who showed up for jury service, every one of us had mothers. That fact (no matter how our mother’s performed) is perhaps the greatest civilizing factors of our humanity. Mothers teach us empathy. Mothers by their very first acts of protection and love impart the meaning of the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you would have others do unto you. When we are first born Carl Jung argued that we don’t even know the difference between ourselves and our moms. The newborn for weeks after stare up at the woman’s face as they feed and think they are looking in a mirror. Looking at themselves. This surely must be the source of empathy. Mother’s teach us by example and they teach us by intention, and no matter how well they did later on, this ability to empathize allows the human race the ability to imagine generosity, to act out of kindness, and to be fierce in our convictions. I would argue that it was the influence of the maternal spirit that make it possible for a two hundred fractious Americans to sit in a government building without all our differences breaking out into violence. We all have mothers and no one loved us like our mothers. We carry that love with us every day and this love civilizes us. Fathers give us a lot as well, but what fathers bring to the table is for another day, and another festival of love and gratitude.

Here is a poem I wrote for my sister in law, Linda Straley who was exceptionally good at Citizenship as well as motherhood. I read this poem at her memorial service.

Summer

After forty seven years in Sitka, Alaska I had almost lost summer as a feeling. Summer in Sitka always felt like a long weekend and never a season with its own set of emotions. When I was a little boy north of Seattle, Summer seemed almost blissful with a big garden, an orchard and a big raspberry patch. There was consistent sun, and woods to play in.

I was the youngest of five. So summer meant the older kids coming home to stay in our big old Prohibition Speak easy of a house, tucked back a mile or so from the beach. There were sheds and bunkers and Gazebo’s and other out buildings all over the property. Formal Gardens and wild flowers up the hill in the woods. Mostly, I remember freedom and lots of fun. My siblings had jobs and most summers each of them had a friend who came with to work and play with our raucous family. We picked berries and fruit my sisters made pies and dinner was the one big meal where everyone gathered together. There seemed to be a lot of practical jokes. It was in that house where we started celebrating almost any important event by hitting the celebrant with a pie in the face. I remember summer as a kind of mania.

Sitka, Alaska was more subdued. The most sun came in April, May, June… often by July and August the serious rains would begin. Though, in June the days were long and I remember when we first arrived there wearing ourselves out by staying out way to late, hiking, or paddling, or picnicking out on a sandy island, then coming home for a quick shower and bed. But it was a short season and really only one month when school was out with the best weather.

When visitors would come to Sitka it was always stressful because they almost always arrived outside the best weather envelope and I remember many gatherings where the rain poured day and night and we were forced to play poker out in a wall tent for penny candy and hitting each other in the face with pies out in the rain. Which I have to say is more fun than it sounds.

But recently, here in California, even though its only Spring, I’m beginning to have the feeling of my childhood sense of summer, there is warmth in the air that gives a sensual feeling sitting outside after dinner: long conversations with friends who come to visit… and people like to come and visit.. Family, friends, so far there have arrived with no pies in the face but I’m predicting it will happen once the true heat of summer comes along.

I was lucky to be alive back in Woodway Park. My dad was doing well at his job with the phone company and we were all enjoying the upper middle class life of having enough money. But the things that made us most happy was the big old barn like house on three acres of cultivation and enough people around to help (including an old English Gardner who lived in a building next to the orchard. I think he felt lucky for the work and his situation too.) Thinking back on it now, we must have been rich, but there was no one to feel superior to because all our neighbors seemed to be as happy as we were. But this is a childhood memory which always feel bred to select out happiness for our memory. I’m sure there was grief … but was blissfully immune.

Today Jan and I live in a small condominium. All the garden property with its flower gardens and pathways are communally owned by our neighbors. This now lends its own happiness. The people I meet are mostly happy and eager to say hello… still there is grief, I’m certain of it, many people mention their living alone after the death of their spouse.

Yet there is a big garden where fruit and vegetables grow, only made possible by the mania of summer on its way.

Here is an old summer poem:

Let's Go Nuts!

On Sunday Jan, Finn, Arthur and I drove a hundred and thirty miles northeast to go to Modesto California. We went to attend a Modesto Nuts baseball game.

The Nuts are a minor League team who are in the Seattle Mariner organisation. I was a little disappointed when I got to the Park the field announcer called the team the “Modesto Mariners”. I suppose they were trying to jack up their Reputation by referring to themselves as “Mariners". While I, on the other hand would be proud to play for the “Nuts.” I bought Arthur and Finn plenty of Nuts merch because it looks so great on them. Arthur looks like a nut anyway.

Perhaps they are thinking about themselves as Mariners these days because there Modesto is surrounded by oceanic lakes and reservoirs full to the brim from the winter flooding and now the spring runoff from the record snowfall in the mountains. One lake which last year was barely a puddle now spreads out for miles, we could not see to the other side. But still we saw no boats nor Mariners out on the windy lakes. We saw Almond fields, and beautifully green pastures for cows and goats: Apple trees and other fruit growing for miles on end. The water managers are going to have their hands full if the runoff is too sudden. The scale of the flooding could be huge. Thousands of acres underwater.

Modesto is lovely once you get off the freeway. The stadium was small but substantial and sits near a city park in a nice neighborhood of old cottages. A a good seat above the dugout was fourteen dollars. The crowd seemed happily diverse. Perhaps fifty percent Hispanic I suppose Though It’s hard to tell by sight not so hard to cock an ear toward the crowd to hear Spanish being spoken. Kids roamed in packs happily jumbled together begging parents for snack money. The adults spending their money on a cold beer and watching the game.

It was warm n Modesto on Sunday, over seventy degrees. a good day for baseball. The play was high quality. One home run and very few forced errors. I like watching the lower leagues. I spent a happy week in Fairbanks watching the Gold Panners which is a summer league of top college players trying to get noticed by the big league scouts. I find the lower level play more exciting for the most part than the MLB. While watching the Nuts you can enjoy what fans call “small ball.” Outs made along the baseline. Good pitching but not dozens pitchers at the ready in the bull pen. Players caught in a pickle. Runners thrown out while trying to steal, or maybe just a little to enthusiastic in their lead off. Anyway I enjoy small ball. Mistakes are the best thing about baseball. So too, I think imperfections are what carry my interest in literature .

One mistake surely must be that they didn’t play Prince’s song, “Let’s Go Crazy” with the second line being: LETS GO NUTS! Which I had been singing on the car ride from Carmel so often that I was hopeful Arthur would start singing it with me. But no… his favorite song remain’s Baa Baa Black sheep which is a fine song but probably not appropriate at the ball park. I have to say it is a pretty archaic song. “One for my master, one for my dame, one for the little boy who lives down the lane…” I’m still holding out for the Modesto Mariners adopting LETS GO CRAZY… LETS GO NUTS!! as their fight song,

On the way home from the Nuts game with a brand new ball.

Here is an old poem I wrote for a project with a friend about the effects of Parkinson’s disease.

My one and only.

Wile E. Coyote

I have been busy. I’ve distributed the first draft of my new novel and am collecting notes for the revision. I have been writing a poem about trying to grow tomatoes and am working on something called a Pitch Book for a Television show that Ray Troll has talked me into.

A pitch book is a document that uses words and images which tries to convince someone to invest in an idea for a television show (or a movie) but in this case Ray Troll wants to make a TV show about Ketchikan. A pitch book is rather like a poem in that it captures the mood and atmosphere of a story and tries to demonstrate its rich visual energy . You don’t write the entire script but you try and convince someone that you have a good idea and promises to be a popular product. I’ve never done one before but I’m trying with the help of my son who knows more about this than I do.

A person once got a hundred thousand dollars for showing a producer a poster with a photo of Richard Gere and the words, “American Gigolo” at the top. That is a haiku of a pitch book. Ours needs more. But how much more? Like a poem every word and image has to count. Investors are notoriously impatient and boor easily with text.

In doing all these things I feel like I’m channeling my animal spirit helper: Wile E. Coyote.

He is my totem animal and I’d argue the totem animal for any person who wants to live a creative life, for to create something new you have to be willing to humiliate yourself… just as Wile E. must understand he actually has a chance when he starts again after that smug bastard, the Roadrunner. Wile E. must believe in himself no matter what the evidence. He is the totem animal of the artist with the slender resume.

John Straley and Ray Troll. Beep Beep.

I have no illusions that I will ever see this tv show in my lifetime. But I just like the idea of writing in a new form. I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything more about this prospective TV show because it’s super ECRET-SAY.

Images of Ketchikan trying to get across Rays vision.

Here is an old poem of mine called Wile E. Coyote Considers The Obvious.

Entertaining

Friends have been visiting and it feels like a holiday.

Ray Troll in Monterey.(left) Trying to save the buildings with his murals.

Friday night I will be reading from BLOWN BY THE SAME WIND in room 118 of the Tannery Center for the Arts in Santa Cruz, sponsored by Catamaran Magazine. If you’re in the area please come by.

Young Arthur is getting bigger all the time. He has been sporting his extra tuffs in the rain lately.

The news has been filled with Donald Trump’s inditement and the entire event has left me depressed. I am not looking forward to the rhetoric of the 2024 campaign. All we have to look forward to is the unceasing complaints about the the legal system and how he has been treated so unfairly and how his arrest has spelled the nadir of American Democracy. I spent many years working for the Public Defender Agency and have heard hundreds of criminal defendants make the same kind of complaints. The DA’s office is picking on me. Aren’t I supposed to be presumed innocent? Why does the press make me look so bad? Yes, being charged with felonies makes everyone feel put upon. After all the Government has used it’s resources to investigate you and take a public position that you are guilty of serious crimes. It’s hard to endure but rarely do criminal defendants get anyone to listen to their complaints. Except in this case where we will hardly hear anything else. Mr. Trump will complain about the Government and all the rest of the business of our country: inflation, the war in Ukraine, the erosion of women’s rights will be untouched by serious discussion.How have we come to the circumstance that the conservative Republican candidate directs almost all of his comments to the degeneracy of the American state? Aren’t they supposed to be the party of patriotism? Now they are the party of complaint.

We went to a great talk this week where my friend Ray Troll showed slides of artists who have influenced him from R. Crumb to Hieronymus Bosch, He was funny and erudite as always. We had a good time watching his son Patrick filming him for an upcoming documentary about Ray. Ray is the kind of artist who is full of ideas and long long lists of potential projects to be embarked upon. He sees potential everywhere. He loves science and language and art and is always invigorating to be around.

Dot is still recovering from surgery but has entered the stage where she is feeling peppy and wants to do more than she should. Her leg has to heal more but she wants to PLAY! Its been two weeks and her incision has healed nicely so she doesn’t have to wear the dreaded cone of shame but she wants to play so much that it breaks my heart to keep her down.

White Lillies stand

waving in the spring wind

like protest placards..

Here is a recording of me reading a new poem for a young child I have yet to meet.

The Desert Has Had rain

Cool here in Carmel. Some rain and Dot is back from knee surgery so we are not walking around the berm anyway.

Dot is pretty doped up after her first knee surgery. Not sure how her ligament’s wore out but they were giving her plenty of pain. So now we’re laying about recovering.

So after days of rain and four days without power we piled into our car and drove eight hours south to the Anza Borrego desert and laid out in a cheap motel. We drove into the outback to look at flowers (which were plentiful and lovely but not really “super”)then to come back the motel in the early afternoon to swim in the pool then walk to the store to pick up some dinner. There was no TV so we napped and I read an old Tony Hillerman novel I had read years ago. Coyote Waits is a fine book. I always admired how Hillerman kept on track and wrote so clearly across cultural boundaries. I only met him once and he helped me out with my first book. He was a real gentleman, especially when meeting fans.

I first went to the Anza Borrego desert when I was six years old. My folks ended up living there in their first years of retirement. Jan and I lived there one winter just after we first went to Sitka. Jan worked in a tree farm and I was shoing horses. We loved the desert then and we love it now. I love the quiet in the desert and the bird song in the morning. The deep heat when the sun is out and the wonderful smell just after the rain. We had some rain at night this trip. But this trip was too short for it takes me about four days to let the quiet seep in and after about the forth day I feel a calmness come over me. Then it was time to pack up and get going up the river of concrete to get back to the rainy north. The inland valleys showed scouring of floods and the agricultural fields seems damp and muddy.

The little town of Borrego Springs never seems to change much. They plan for the big real estate boom which never comes. Today water seems to be the great limiting factor to growth. Many of the ornamental trees that Jan helped to plant and grow seem starved for water around the old developments that never really took off. Borrego is an anomaly in California, the seed of change that never took root. But birds and big vistas still crowd the sky. Borrego Springs is proud of their night sky and it is a marvel to me seeing a local newspaper which features the most current constellations appearing in different corners of the sky.

Here are some photos offered for their evidentiary value rather than artistic merit:

Lunch time in the outback

a bad picture of a Phainapipala

Now we are home. Cars swish by on the highway and the hummingbirds worry the feeder. California is a big state that allows itself to be almost completely roaded, which makes it feel more democratic than Alaska. All but the very center of the LA basin, which is huge for sure, but all the rest of what we saw in the state was very green this trip, green and mostly pastoral. Beautiful in its own unique way.

The desert was green and blooming and as always quiet. So quiet and clear you could almost believe your could hear the stars.

Mocking bird sings

in a water starved thorn tree.

Stars turn in the sky.

Here is an old erotic poem I wrote in the desert years ago during an actual superbloom.

The Way Light Works On Trees

Rain in Carmel. Just north of us the flooding has been horrendous. We have been lucky our berm has held. We went for four days without power. All this meant for me was I kept going to bed so early that I started waking up in the middle of the night. I found ways of milking juice out of my phone, so I listened to most of Emily Wilsons translation of the Odyssey. (he’s made it Home but now the pesky suitors!) I love this translation right from the begining. “Sing to me of a complicated man.” Plus I enjoy how she changes up all the mentions of the “Rosy fingers of dawn on the wine dark sea.”

The lack of power, the food rotting in the freezer and the stinky clothes in our hampers, suggested a trip. So we packed the car quickly and in the dark and took off. We went to see the wild flowers in Anza Borrego State Park. Just arrived after an eight hour drive. Dot came along of course and she has been a real trooper all the way.

I will have more details on the desert next week.

Today I just want to post a few photos of what light can do on one cottonwood tree and a vase of flowers sitting on our kitchen table.

Light…

is mood and meaning;

the plot and atmosphere.

There is no story

without it. .

Herre is an old poem that I wrote back when I was doing cases. I wrote it in a hotel room in Wrangell one weekend in a hard southeastern storm. I wrote it the day after I learned that the great poet Jack Gilbert died. It’s called. “I’m Tired of Poets Telling Me What God Wants.”